Our aikido club is in Saudi Arabia. We have a couple of locals in our roster. They dont bow to the shomen and their partner, both in seiza and standing. We dont have a problem with that. Women are also not allowed to mix with the opposite sex in public areas, that is why we dont have women in our dojo.

Regarding the bowing, we requested our students to just make a fist with the right hand, and an open palm on the left just like in most kung fu and say osu!

Hope that helps.

Romuel,

Thanks for your response. I was curious how that worked in Saudi Arabia. I take it that most of your members are foreign nationals?

I remember someone metioned somewhere on this board that they knew of a dojo in Indonesia where they had the women and men split up in separate areas. But then someone else spoke up saying they have never seen that. And there was also a young woman training some where in southeast asia who wrote an anonymous post where at a seminar many men would not train with her and some of the few who did were unnecessarily rought with her.

Currently one of our members teaches aikido at a local mosque in Fort Lauderdale and it's open to men and boys. But a couple of men who do practice and want to grade in the USAF will occaisionaly train at our dojo. Recently we had a seminar and they just trained amongst themselves. However, a couple of them did train with women. We also have less conservative muslim members in our dojo who have absolutely no problem training with women.

I was just curious how this plays out in Islamic countries or those countries with very large Muslim populations.

Anne Marie GiriWomen in Aikido: a place where us gals can come together and chat about aikido.